On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen, assistant physician to the leper hospitals at Bergen, Norway.

  • Hansen, G. Armauer (Gerhard Armauer), 1841-1912.
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen, assistant physician to the leper hospitals at Bergen, Norway. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    or only occasionally, influenced by external circumstances, such as many abnormities of skin, eyes, &c., many neuroses and mental dis- eases. It is satisfactorily demonstrated that all these states may be, and very commonly are, inherited. The phenomena connected with the hereditary transmission of these states are completely analogous to the phenomena by inheritance of physiological qualities.^ In no case we consider the inheritance as depending on the transmission of any specific matter producing the same consequences in offspring as in parents, but as transmission of structural peculiarities. We use even the heredity of normal and abnormal mental peculiarities as a very weighty argument against the belief in anything specific- psychical, whereby every one at his birth, or perhaps before, becomes, so to say, infected. If we now turn to the specific diseases, and examine how the case stands in respect of their transmission to the ofi'spring, we need say little with respect to the unquestionably parasitic disorders, such as scabies, favus, &c., or of the acute infectious diseases. Although in many cases it would be a tolerably easy task to construct family tables exhibiting individuals in two or more generations who have suffered from scabies, ague, measles, &c., still no one has ever supposed heredity to exist in these diseases; they are in each case considered to be produced by the influence of the specific morbific matter. Yariola can be transmitted from the mother to the unborn child, and so can, perhaps, some of the other acute infectious diseases, but this is regarded as contagion, no one thinks it to be inhe- ritance. Syphilis may be considered as a type of specific and contagious chronic diseases, and syphihs is generally considered the most exqui- site example of an hereditary disease. And though the phenomena attending its transmission to offspring are, at least in most cases, just the same as those connected with variola, so the specific conta- gious disease is transmitted to the ovum. When it is sometimes assumed that congenital syphilis occasionally does not appear until some years after birth, nay, even till early youth, it is not, as far as I have been able to gather from Hterature, made apparent that the individuals in question have not had visible symptoms of the disease at their birth or shortly after it, and still less that they have had no syphilitic affections of internal organs. And to prove this must be difficult, if not impossible. It is a well-known fact that in autopsy often reveals to us a far-developed syphilis in internal organs, while no symptoms have as yet appeared outwardly in children of syphi- litic parents. It would carry us too far out of the way, to enter upon I Lucas 'L'Heredite naturelle.' Sedgwick, Sexual Limitation in Here- dity, ' Med.-Cliir. Review,' 27, 28, 31, 32. Darwin, ' The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.'